Nessie sparks a press circus
The Daily Mail ‘proves’ the existence of the Loch Ness Monster with a sensational front page photograph
Even by the standards of the Daily Mail, its front page on 21 April 1934 was a sensation. ‘London Surgeon’s Photo of the Monster’ read the headline. Below, a black-and-white image showed the long neck and head of a dinosaur-like monster, emerging from the waters. The picture’s source could hardly have been more respectable: the London society gynaecologist Robert Kenneth Wilson. Now there could be no doubt: the Loch Ness Monster was real.
Although the legend of a monster dates back to the sixth century, the Loch Ness Monster was really an invention of the 1930s, when a series of witnesses claimed to have seen a creature in the loch. So in December 1933, the Mail sent a big-game hunter, Marmaduke Wetherell, to locate the creature. He duly found some huge footprints on the shore. ‘Monster of Loch Ness is Not Legend But a Fact’ screamed the headline. But when the Mail asked experts from the Natural History Museum to examine the prints, they reported that they had probably been created by the foot of a dead hippopotamus that had been converted into an umbrella stand.
The ‘surgeon’s photograph’, then, could hardly have been better timed. But was the timing suspicious? Indeed it was. Decades later, Wetherell’s stepson confessed that he and his father had made the ‘monster’ from a toy submarine, and used Wilson as a go-between to lend authenticity. “We’ll give them their monster,” Wetherell reportedly said. And, fake or not, the result was one of the most famous photographs in history.